Working on 1 FCPX project between 2 machines. Best practise?

I have created an FCPX project on my Mac Pro in the office. The Final Cut Events and Final Cut Projects folders are in my 'Movies' folder as normal.

When I created the project I also created Proxy Files. The original camera media is in one of my hard drive bays on the Mac Pro. I am now happily editing on my Mac Pro using Proxy Media.

I now which to take this work home so I can edit on my MackBook Pro and then return to the office and carry on working there.

I have a portable hard dive for this. My question is what exactly do I need to put on my hard drive to work from home? Do I just copy over the Final Cut Events and Final Cut Projects folders to my portable hard drive? If so, do I not copy the original media over because I don't actually need that? When I am home to I copy these to my Macbook Pro or should I work directly from the portable had drive? When I get back to the office how do I update my project with the new one?

Thanks.

I just read this thread this morning it might be of help:

www.fcp.co/forum/4-final-cut-pro-x-fcpx/...ys-moving-the-events

1st, on a Mac Pro, your Events and Projects should be on a non-system, internal drive for best performance. Should be no reason to use Proxy media on a Mac Pro. If you have a good graphics card and 8-16 GB RAM, you're about as powerful an edit station as you can get.

To get your stuff home, in the Project Library, right-click the project and select Duplicate (Command-D). In that window tell it to make a copy on your external drive using whole events. This makes it identical (mostly) to the office event/project setup.

When you come back to the office, all you need is the CurrentVersion.fcpproject file from inside of that Project folder. This is a database file. It has a unique ID number. You can drop this into that project's folder on your office Mac. OR just bring the portable drive back and plug it in, if you're editing directly on it.

Don't copy from the Finder, or you'll have duplicated events and projects that share a database ID that will cause FCP X confusion when it launches.

You're right I don't nee to use Proxy media on my Mac Pro, no doubt. But don't i need to create it so I can edit from home? I'm not taking 500GB of footage home to edit with.

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I haven't had the situation you are looking at, even with a decked out mac pro (24GB ram, 4 drives in RAID0), I have to use proxy media on feature films or heavy graphics on small projects.

Things may get a little crazy if you are wanting to have just proxy on one machine and then full res on another referencing the same events.

You made a feature film with FCPX? Like to see that.
Yes you can use Proxy footage on Mac Pro depending what formats and codecs you are using... it can get snappier.

Yes you can have two Events one with the original and the other Proxy and care your project folder with you or use Dropbox!

I'm in the middle of cutting a feature in FCPX and can tell you that Proxy media sure makes it go a lot faster.

Ferrari, one approach I've done is to never copy my original media into the FCPX Events folder, but let it generate the proxies in there. That way, my large original media lives on a separate drive, and the event files just contain the proxy media. In FCPX preferences, I have it set up to generate proxy media for everything that comes in.

Then, if you want to take it on a portable drive, simply duplicate the event to that drive. Load it up on your other computer and you should be good to go!

For the Projects, you can use dropbox to automatically sync your FCPX project folder and keep it in sync on both machines. Works great. I've done edit projects with another partner in London (i'm in LA) and we shared the event database and the project file via dropbox.

One quick note, that portable drive should be fairly fast, depending on what you are editing. FW800 minimum I hope (and in that case you NEED proxy files IMHO)

I've duplicated the project and the events onto a portable drive.

I get home, plug it into my machine there and everything loads up but there are some missing event files. Not many, but some are missing. Curiously when I click 'reveal in finder' on them they are indeed on my portable drive but there are just a few kb in size with no extension.

What is going on? When I getback to the office and plug that drive into my machine there are no missing files.

I'm just making the move from FCP7 to X and just trying to set up my workflow so i can work from 2 machines on the same project.

Thanks.

Some of your files weren't actually imported into the event. The small files have a little arrow on the icon indicating that they are just alias files that are pointing to the original media. Being that you are on a different computer, it won't be able to find it.

If you are using proxy files, this shouldn't be an issue since FCPX always keeps proxy files in the event folder.

So first, double check that you have your preferences set to using proxy media.

Then, back on your main computer with all your original footage, select the event, and choose "organize event files" from the file menu. This will copy any files that are outside the event folder into that folder. Then you should be free to move.

But, be aware, you are moving not only the proxy files, but also the original media.

It would be really nice if FCP X would let you select which type of media to duplicate from an event(original,an alias to original media if not in event, optimized, poxy) this would make alot of sense on these much larger projects I'm working on. Sending this request to FCP X feedback.

Agreed. No need to move original media.

At the moment I have to wait fro it to copy over and then delete it again as remotely I only want to work with proxy files.